"The
community interpreter has a very different role and
responsibilities from a commercial or conference interpreter. She
is responsible for enabling professional and client, with very
different backgrounds and perceptions and in an unequal
relationship of power and knowledge, to communicate to their mutual
satisfaction."(1)
This
definition still applies today. The clients it refers to are mainly
immigrants, refugees of all age groups, migrant workers and their
children. Even if they have been living in their host country for
years, their community, like New York's "Little Italy" or the
Polish area of Chicago, has protected them from the need to learn
English until they need social security or health care. The
settings are hospitals and doctors' offices, schools, the various
offices dealing with immigrant matters, housing and social
security, and police stations. Compared to conference interpreting,
the range of languages needed is enormous, even when compared to
what is in store for the European Union. Moreover, the language
level may be quite different from that of a diplomatic conference:
regional variations and dialects can be a problem. Previously, the
difficulties of dealing with this population have only been
described by psychologists in the literature on the questioning of
suspects or victims of accidents. The clients are worried, afraid,
and sometimes illiterate. They find themselves in strange
surroundings. Add to these difficulties the fact that the
professionals -- the doctors, nurses, police officers, social
workers etc. -- are usually in a hurry. They have a given case load
to take care of and are disinclined to let the interpreter do "a
beautiful consecutive." In a nutshell, community interpreters need
people skills as well as language and cultural knowledge -- and
interpreting know-how.
Some
languages dominate: Spanish in the US, Turkish in Germany and
Austria, Italian and Greek in Australia. But the Health Care
Interpreting Services office of the Heartland Alliance in Chicago
at present has demand for 28 languages. It is also obvious that it
is not only the clients of community interpreters who are usually
immigrants, but that the interpreters themselves are foreign-born.
Their backgrounds vary accordingly. Hardly any of these
interpreters have proper training in interpretation. Even where
some efforts in this direction are made, the most common length of
training is 40 hours.(2)
"Most interpretation in health care settings, unfortunately, is
still provided by a variety of other people who have been neither
screened, nor trained, and who do not self-identify as being
interpreters." (3)
Interest
in this kind of interpreting, however, has grown by leaps and
bounds. Last year the International Conference on University
Institutes for Translation and Interpretation (CIUTI) decided that
institutes do not have to teach conference interpreting exclusively
in order to become a member. They may offer any of a range of
interpreter specializations, including community interpreting.
There is
not sufficient space to include a comprehensive bibliography on
community interpreting here. The best sources would be the
proceedings of the Canadian conferences on "interpreters in the
community" -- the next one is planned for 2001 in Montreal -- and
of the Babelea conference (Vienna, November 1999).
1 (Shackman, Jane. The Right
to be Understood: A Handbook on Working With, Employing and
Training Community Interpreters. 1984, Cambridge, England,
National Extension College.)
2 Cynthia E. Roat, ATA
Chronicle, March 2000)
3 Ibid.